Dumas Malone

Dumas Malone (January 10, 1892 – December 27, 1986) was an American historian, biographer, and editor noted for his six-volume biography on Thomas Jefferson, for which he received the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for history. In 1983 he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Early life and education

Born at Coldwater, Mississippi, Malone received his bachelor's degree in 1910 from Emory College (Emory University). In 1916 he received his divinity degree from Yale University in 1916. Between 1917 and 1919 during the First World War, he became a second lieutenant in the Marine Corps. Following the war, he returned to Yale University where he obtained his Master's (1921) and doctorate (1923) degrees. He won the John Addison Porter prize in 1923 for his dissertation The Public Life of Thomas Cooper, 1783-1839 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1926).

Career

Malone served on the faculty of Yale University, Columbia University, and the University of Virginia, where he was the Thomas Jefferson Foundation Professor of History. He was a Director of the Harvard University Press and served as editor of the original Dictionary of American Biography. His first contribution to historical scholarship was a still authoritative biography of the American political commentator and educator Thomas Cooper (Yale University Press, 1926).

He is best known for his six-volume biography of Thomas Jefferson, published between 1948 and 1981, for which he earned the 1975 Pulitzer Prize. Among the many contributions of this authoritative study was Malone's inclusion in each volume of a detailed timeline of Jefferson's life. Malone's volumes were widely praised for their lucid and graceful writing style, for their rigorous and thorough scholarship, and for their attention to Jefferson's evolving constitutional and political thought. Later reviewers, however, faulted Malone for his tendency to adopt Jefferson's own perspective and thus to be insufficiently criticial of his occasional political errors, faults, and lapses; for his bias in favor of Jefferson and against his principal adversaries Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr, and John Marshall; and for his failure to come to grips with Jefferson's life as a slaveowner and his relationship with his slave Sally Hemings. Thus, Malone received considerable though balanced criticism in Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy (1997), the first book by the historian Annette Gordon-Reed.

The six volumes, originally published by Atlantic/Little, Brown, and in 2005 republished by the University of Virginia Press, were:

• Jefferson the Virginian (1948)
• Jefferson and the Rights of Man (1951)
• Jefferson and the Ordeal of Liberty (1962)
• Jefferson the President: First Term, 1801-1805 (1970)
• Jefferson the President: Second Term, 1805-1809 (1974)
• The Sage of Monticello (1981).

Malone also published a set of lectures, Thomas Jefferson as Political Leader, with the University of California Press in 1963.

Legacy and honors

• 1983 President Ronald Reagan awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom.^[1] Malone died on December 27, 1986 at Charlottesville, Virginia.

Malone died in Virginia. He is buried at the University of Virginia Cemetery and Columbarium in Charlottesville.

References

1. ^ Remarks at the Presentation Ceremony for the Presidential Medal of Freedom, 1983-02-23, retrieved 2009-07-30

Persondata
Name	Malone, Dumas
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Date of birth	January 10, 1892
Place of birth	Coldwater, Mississippi
Date of death	December 27, 1986
Place of death